This afternoon, I am pleased and excited to inform all of you that I have accepted a secondment to Environment Canada during my sabbatical year from July 2012 through June 2013. I will be a visiting scholar at Environment Canada, and hope to be involved in many aspects of their work over the next year. My hope is that this opportunity will provide me with hands-on experience which will improve my research and my teaching – I love teaching environmental policy design and I expect it will be a very valuable experience to participate in it.

Along with all of the challenges of picking up my life and re-locating to Ottawa for a year, there will also be some necessary changes which will affect this blog as well as my Twitter account. Effective immediately, I will have little to no on-line presence, and I will not be posting further updates until after I have returned to the confines of the academy.

Over the past year and a half, I have benefited immensely from the conversations, corrections, arguments, and criticisms which have come through this blog and through Twitter. I have learned more over the past 18 months than I could have imagined when I started this adventure, and for that I am very thankful to each of you.

I hope you will keep my FrogBlog in your bookmarks and Google Reader feeds until my return, as I would like to pick up this conversation with you again then. Somehow, I doubt we’ll have stopped talking about energy and the environment by Canada Day 2013. In the meantime, you can reach me at my personal email, andrew@andrewleach.ca.

Thanks! It will be a lot of fun, to say the least. The nature of the position means that I won’t be speaking or writing publicly, but I’ll still have freedom on the research side since my projects don’t stop when I go on leave.

Not surprising (but ironic) that an apologist for the oil patch gets a gig at the nation’s environment department — NRCAN might have been a better place for you. At any rate, a few words of advice: Don’t disagree with Mike Beale — its a career limiting move. Check Nick Macaluso’s numbers — they are often wrong. Don’t be shy to seek out the long term climate experts who have opinions and are not merely sycophants to the notion of oil sands development without GHG controls. They are there. Hidden, but there. PVM sucks — get an office somewhere else. If people are falling asleep in a meeting, talk about cap and trade or international offsets — that’ll wake them up and raise the room temperature. Use eastern proximitiy to travel though liberal Ontario, the North East US and Europe. Talk to the locals. Look at their renewable energy development and other policies. Then you’ll realize that outside of Alberta, some people do have legitimate concerns about GHGs and are doing more for climate change mitigation than spin and endless talk and study.

As I said to a friend of mine when he was appointed as Harper’s communications director, I’m not sure if congratulations or condolences are in order. Here’s to hoping it’s the former rather than the latter 🙂

Well, I’ve been wondering where you went. Appreciated your twitter chat even though I often thought you were being rhetorical and slightly mocking in tone and question to alternative views. We Greens are a serious lot trying to get movement on serious issues. All the best in Ottawa. It’s certainly an interesting time to be there.